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William Jowett’s Christian Researches: British Protestants and Religious Plurality in the Mediterranean, Syria and the Holy Land, 1815–30*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Gareth Atkins*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Extract

[Acre,] Sunday, Nov. 2, 1823 —This morning, in the Consul’s room, we held Divine Service, with a congregation of ten souls — as promiscuous an assembly as could well be expected within the compass of so small a number. The individuals who composed it were, a British Consul — his Dragoman, a native of the country — a Maronite Priest — a Roman Physician — one Greek — one Jew — an English captain of a merchant vessel then in port — my servant, who is under French protection — an American Brother-Missionary — and myself, of the Church of England … The whole Service was in Italian.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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Footnotes

*

I am deeply indebted to Simeon Wallis for his valuable insights into this subject

References

1 Jowett, William, Christian Researches in Syria and the Holy Land,from MDCCCXV to MDCCCXX (London, 1825), 145.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. 176.

3 Ibid. 188.

4 Ibid. 136.

5 Ibid. 158.

6 Ibid. 208.

7 Ibid. 270.

8 Among recent works, see Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700-1850 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tennant, Bob, Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760-1870 (Oxford, 2013), 92166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Andrew, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester, 2004), 3963.Google Scholar

9 Carey, Eustace, Memoir of William Carey, D.D. (London, 1836), 18.Google Scholar

10 A similar point is made in Porter, Religion, 116-35.

11 Davidson, Allan K., Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 1786-1813 (Sutton Courtenay, 1990), 151-63.Google Scholar

12 ‘Christian Researches in the Mediterranean’, Christian Observer 22 (1823), 30-45, at 30.

13 An exception is Sedra, Paul, From Mission to Modernity (London, 2011)Google Scholar, which focuses on education in nineteenth-century Egypt. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by contrast, has received considerable recent coverage: see Berg, Heleen Murre-van den, ed., New Faith in Ancient Lands (Leiden, 2006)Google Scholar; Sharkey, Heather, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar; Khalaf, Samir, Protestant Missionaries in the Levant: Ungodly Puritans, 1820-1860 (London, 2012)Google Scholar. Werff, Lyle L. Vander, Christian Mission to Muslims:The Record (Pasadena, CA, 1977), 153-4, discusses Jowett briefly.Google Scholar

14 Lewis, Donald M., The Origins of Christian Zionism (Cambridge, 2010), 214—20.Google Scholar

15 ‘Appendix V’, Proceedings of the CMS (1817), 141-55, at 143-4.

16 The documents Martyn had been working on were swiftly published, including his Persian New Testament (St Petersburg, 1815) and his Arabic New Testament (Calcutta, 1816): see Sargent, John, Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D. (London, 1816)Google Scholar; Lee, Samuel, ed., Controversial Tracts on Christianity and Mohammedanism, by the late Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D. (Cambridge, 1824)Google Scholar; see also Stanley, Brian, “‘An ardour of devotion”: The Spiritual Legacy of Henry Martyn’, in India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding — Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical — in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed. Young, Richard Fox, SHCM (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), 108-26.Google Scholar

17 The best overview and bibliography of this area is Heleen Murre-van den Berg, ‘The Middle East: Western Missions and the Eastern Churches, Islam and Judaism’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, eds, CHC, 8: World Christianities, c. 1815-c.1914 (Cambridge, 2006), 458-72.

18 Anon., Random Recollections of Exeter Hall (London, 1838), 116-17.Google Scholar

19 Hole, Charles, The Early History of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, to the End of A.D. 1814 (London, 1896), 297, 306, 417-18Google Scholar. The date of Jowett’s deaconing is unclear, but he was licensed as curate of St James’s, Nottingham, in March 1811 and priested by the archbishop of York in December: Clergy of the Church of England Database, online at:<http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/search/index.jsp>, accessed 11 July 2014.

20 Childe, Charles F., The Finished Course: Brief Notices of Departed Church Missionaries (London, 1865), 169-83Google Scholar; Pitman, Emma Raymond, Heroines of the Mission Field (London, 1880), 322-9.Google Scholar

21 ‘Appendix V’, 141.

22 ‘Appendix III’, Proceedings (1803), 238.

23 Stock, Eugene, The History of the Church Missionary Society, 4 vols (1899—1916), 1: 223.Google Scholar

24 An interesting, although highly coloured, account of Naudi is given in Wolff, Joseph, Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff; D.D., LL.D. (London, 1861), 101-3.Google Scholar

25 ‘Appendix V’, 147.

26 Ibid. 153.

27 Proceedings (1828), 142.

28 Stock, History, 1: 227.

29 Buchanan, Claudius, Christian Researches in Asia (Cambridge, 1811), 88—123.Google Scholar

30 Milner would help Jowett in distinguishing between ‘visible’ and ‘true’ members of the Church of Christ: ‘Appendix V’, 144.

31 Gauge, David and Ledger-Lomas, Michael, eds, Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar.

32 Ainsworth, W. F., The Claims of the Christian Aborigines (London, 1843), 6.Google Scholar

33 Childe, , Finished Course, 173.Google Scholar

34 Missionary Register (1816), 246 .

35 Cambridge, University Library, British and Foreign Bible Society [hereafter: BFBS] Archives, BSA/D 1/2, Abstract of Scriptures in Depository, 1830.

36 Goodwin, Stefan, Malta, Mediterranean Bridge (Westport, CT, 2002), 7880.Google Scholar

37 Wolff, , Travels, 101-3.Google Scholar

38 For which it was necessary to send a deputation to lean on Earl Bathurst: BFBS Archives, BSA/D 1/2, Robert Pinkerton to Jowett, 26 April 1825.

39 Stunt, Timothy C. F., From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain 1815-35 (Edinburgh, 2000), 122-33.Google Scholar

40 Tibawi, A. L.. ‘The Genesis and Early History of the Syrian Protestant College’, Middle East Journal 21 (1967), 115, at 6.Google Scholar

41 Missionary Register (1818), 292.

42 ‘Appendix V’, 149.

43 Paterson, John, The Book for Every Land: Reminiscences of Labour and Adventure in the Work of Bible Circulation in the north of Europe and in Russia (London, 1858), 288393.Google Scholar

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45 For details of these developing areas of influence, see Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal, ON, 2002)Google Scholar; Corr, Donald Philip, ‘The Field Is the World’: Proclaiming, Translating and Serving by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-40 (Pasadena, CA, 2009).Google Scholar

46 BFBS Archives, BSA/D1/2, Jowett and Cleardo Naudi to ‘BFBS Secretary’, 24 September 1822.

47 Jowett, William, Christian Researches in the Mediterranean, from MDCCCXV to MDCCCXX, 3rd edn (London, 1824), 284, 293.Google Scholar

48 For one example of this, see John Hartley, ‘Visit to the Apocalyptic Churches, in the Year 1826’, in idem, Researches in Greece and the Levant, 2nd edn (London, 1833), 223—304 Google Scholar; see also Ledger-Lomas, Michael, ‘Ephesus’, in Gange, and Ledger-Lomas, , eds, Cities of Cod, 254-84.Google Scholar

49 Cited in Church Missionary Society’, Christian Observer 20 (1821), 831-9, at 834.Google Scholar

50 Bar-Yosef, Eitan, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799-1917 (Oxford, 2005), 1860.Google Scholar

51 Josiah, and Pratt, John Henry, Memoir of the Rev. Josiah Pratt (London, 1849), 185.Google Scholar

52 Ibid.

53 Proceedings (1820), 109.

54 Missionary Register (1819), 134.

55 Ibid. (1820), 477.

56 BFBS Archives, BSA/D1/2, Jowett to BFBS Secretary, 17 April 1820.

57 Ullendorff, Edward, Ethiopia and the Bible (London, 1968), 162-72.Google Scholar

58 Jowett, , Mediterranean, 203.Google Scholar

59 Stock, History, 1:231.

60 Howsam, Leslie, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar

61 Jowett, , Mediterranean, 249.Google Scholar

62 Ibid. 250-2. It is worth making clear that Evangelicals were far from being mere prejudiced ‘Orientalists’ in the Saidian mode. Green, Nile, ‘Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism and the English Universities, 1800-50’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (2012), 337-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that they shared much of the positivity of academic Orientalists such as Sir William Jones, whose enlightened study of Indo-European languages and culture influenced biblical and philological scholarship. At the same time, missionary preachers and publicists were apt to paint alien religious practices as barbarous and backward: see, for instance, Pennington, Brian K., Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford, 2005), 23100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Jowett, , Mediterranean, 258.Google Scholar

64 Smith, Eli and Dwight, H. G. O., Missionary Researches in Armenia including a Journey through Asia Minor, and into Georgia and Persia (London, 1834), ix Google Scholar

65 Borrow, George, Hie Bible in Spain, 3 vols (London, 1843), I: xx.Google Scholar

66 Journal of a Deputation sent to the East by the Committee of the Malta Protestant College, in 1849, 2 vols (London, 1854), I: xiii.

67 Detzler, Wayne, ‘Robert Pinkerton: Principal Agent of the BFBS in the Kingdoms of Germany’, in Batalden, Stephen, Cann, Kathleen and Dean, John, eds, Sowing the Word: the Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society (Sheffield, 2004), 268-85.Google Scholar

68 See Coakley, J. F., The Church of the East and the Church of England (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, W. H., Antioch and Canterbury (Piscataway, NJ, 2005).Google Scholar